This is my 17th year in education, and somehow the first-day-of-school energy still gets me. There is something about walking into a classroom at the beginning of a new semester (the empty seats, the half-familiar nervousness, the possibility of who those students might become by December) that still feels exciting.
When I say this is my 17th year in education, though, that only tells part of the story.
Before I became an English teacher, I was a journalist, web designer, web-hosting provider, and ecommerce educator.In the early days of the commercial web, I helped a large parenting community and several small ecommerce businesses create and maintain independent websites of their own. Later, I taught entrepreneurs how to navigate internet marketing and interviewed business owners about the systems they were building around their work.
At the time, I did not think of any of that as preparation for becoming an educator. Yet teaching gave that work a new home. I am now using those same instincts to build resources, learning experiences, and systems for students and teachers.
Teaching gave that work a new home. The people I was building resources and systems with were now students, teachers, and schools.
I started teaching adult learners web design at a technology center and substitute teaching in my children’s school district in 2009 before landing my first high school English position in 2011. I spent the next decade in middle and high school classrooms before stepping away in 2021 to begin doctoral studies.
Since then, my classroom has continued changing. I worked with teachers through the Oklahoma Writing Project, as a pre-service teacher supervisor through a state university, and with student writers in the OU Writing Center. I taught my first college composition course in Spring 2025, then spent last year teaching first-year and advanced composition, teaching writing center theory and pedagogy, and serving for a semester as an interim writing center director.
And now I will be mentoring a new secondary ELA teacher at a local school district, teaching two sections of first-year composition at my university, and continuing to work with teachers to build systems grounded in theory- and research-based pedagogies.Over the years, reThink ELA has grown from a website where I shared classroom resources into something much closer to the kind of work I seem to have been building toward all along.
Looking back, I can see how much of my earlier work followed me into education. Journalism taught me to listen closely to people and their stories. Building websites taught me to think in terms of systems and infrastructure. Entrepreneurship taught me to create, revise, and respond to the people using what I built. Teaching gave all of those habits a new purpose—and increasingly, they shape the kind of work I want to do with other teachers through reThink ELA.
I am increasingly interested in what happens when we build systems with teachers: systems shaped by classroom experience and teacher feedback, centered on students, grounded in theory, and supported by research. What happens when curriculum, professional learning, implementation support, and evidence of student learning all inform one another? That question is shaping the school partnership work I am developing through reThink ELA now. I want to build something that grows out of what teachers and students are actually experiencing in classrooms, then continues to change over the course of multiple iterations.
Maybe that is also why the first-day-of-school energy still gets me. Every new group of students reminds me that educational systems ultimately have to work for the people sitting in those classrooms. As reThink ELA grows and I begin building deeper partnerships with teachers and schools, I want to stay close to that reality: listening, learning, revising, and building alongside the people doing the work. So here’s to year 17, another room full of writers I’m just now getting to know, and whatever they help me understand about what reThink ELA should become next.